


heart-song

by amorremanet



Category: Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: Aftermath of Violence, Alternate Universe - Merpeople, Angst with a Happy Ending, Families of Choice, Gen, Hurt/Comfort, Long Live Feedback Comment Project, Minor Character Death, Near Death Experiences, Non-Graphic Violence, Rescue, Shiro Has Long Hair, Singing, Whalesong, Whaling, Zine: Seaborne - A Voltron Merfolk Fanzine
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-04-06
Updated: 2019-04-06
Packaged: 2020-01-05 12:40:55
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,247
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18366224
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/amorremanet/pseuds/amorremanet
Summary: Iverson, a humpback mer, saves Orca mer Shiro from certain death. While Shiro heals, both find the family that they’re missing.





	heart-song

**Author's Note:**

> I’m so excited to finally share this piece! Written for the _Seaborne_ zine, raising money for The Ocean Conservancy. If you want to learn more about the project or see other works from it, please go check them out on **[twitter](https://twitter.com/Voltronmerzine/)** and/or **tumblr**! ♡♡

One thing that Iverson has learned: hunting goes best when done alone.

True, a pod could secure meals in ways that Iverson, on his own, cannot. Following a leader, a group of his fellow mers arch their humped backs and inhale deeply before they plunge down into the middle-depths together. They spiral around each other in intricate dances, weaving cyclones out of the water. Finally, they shoot up to the surface, capturing fishes in their mouths, arms, or nets. Should fish clear out too early, they catch whatever krill they can.

When too many of Iverson’s kind gather, though, problems ensue. Arguments abound over someone’s tail-fluke not being blue enough, or if mers with grey tails have the true advantage. Adolescents drag each other into inane comparisons over the relative sizes of the fins along their sides and how much force they can put into their claps. Even adults sound off competitively, keening as though rorquals don’t insult themselves by treating their songs as such trifling things. If a pod grows too large, then insufficient hauls mean someone will go hungry.

Swimming through waters near his grotto, Iverson spots the worst of all potential problems: humans, out close to the open water. The sunlight glares off the bow of their long, black ship—and Iverson glares in return.

Humans use those vessels for hunting mers.

With a powerful flip of his heavy, gray tail, Iverson darts toward the ship. Close enough, and he could try to make them leave. Others around here can’t protect themselves like Iverson can, even with only one eye. They’re too young, or they don’t have his bulk and his raw power.

Nothing will happen if he’s caught too soon, so he ducks behind one of the bay’s broad rock formations. No bubbles or ripples follow in his wake. Clutching the algae-encrusted stone, Iverson steadies himself. Slowly, carefully, he leans out from his cover enough to get a better idea of what these beasts plan to do today, so close to his home. From here, he counts at least twelve different humans. Too likely, more lay in wait.

As he dives and heads for another stone pillar, Iverson could swear that he sees red. Faint spirals of it, spilling and twisting through the water, ebbing away from the humans’ ship. They get larger as he closes in on his target. Surfacing, he inhales deeply—and there it is: the acrid smell of blood, clobbering Iverson and failing to conceal itself in the salt-water.

Iverson quickly spots the source: six mers, whose tanned torsos meld into their large, black and white tails. Orca mers, each of them either dead or dying.

His fingers won’t stop shaking. Not even when Iverson digs them at the stone. If he’d left his grotto sooner—

“What about that one, Captain?”

Iverson nearly dives again, lest they find him—but the human points at the rock formation nearest to their craft.

Another human shakes his stark, white head. “Leave him. We can’t keep him alive, and he’s worth nothing dead. Not in _that_ sorry condition.”

As their vessel heads for the horizon, the stench of their devastation could make Iverson sick. Once they’re gone, he swims over to where they were. Surveying the area turns up no immediate clues—until Iverson finds the “him” in question.

Clinging to the rocks one-handed, this Orca mer looks barely older than a calf. Jagged wounds stretch down his back and sides, angry red and bleeding. His long hair—black, save a clump of white near the front—sticks to the sides of his tanned face. Drawing closer, Iverson can barely make out the sounds of the young one’s ragged breaths. Worst of all, his right arm is missing, hacked off at the shoulder.

He groans in protest as Iverson uses algae to staunch that wound. But when Iverson shushes him, the young one nods. As Iverson takes up his remaining arm, he can’t keep his eyes open. Can’t keep his head from drooping onto Iverson’s shoulder.

“It’ll be all right,” Iverson promises, for all he doubts that. “I’m here to help.”

  


* * *

  


Back at his grotto, Iverson spends the rest of the day cleaning the boy’s wounds and dressing them with kelp. Many go far deeper than he guessed they would. One, down in the white area of the youngling’s underbelly, still has the point of a human’s harpoon stuck inside.

Although he doesn’t expect much—not with how many bodies the humans pulled up in their nets—Iverson listens all night for the sound of an Orca’s song. Someone from this mer’s pod could still be out there. Someone could come looking for him. Orca pods aren’t like the more fluid arrangements among Iverson’s kind. They wouldn’t abandon this youngling. If separated, they’d search every ocean that they could for him.

By the time the full moon climbs to her highest point in the sky, Iverson hasn’t heard anyone singing. None of his own kind, certainly no Orcas, nobody.

In the hopes that someone might hear him, he leaves his young charge in the grotto. He swims out into the open water, inhales as deeply as he can, and dives. In the depths, Iverson lets out a long song, moaning and mournful. Other mers might not understand exactly, but they should hear the cry for help. It fills Iverson’s heart as his breaths fill up his lungs, and somewhere out there in the ocean, _someone_ should hear this song and come for the youngling. _Someone_ should hear how much their lost boy needs them.

Come sunrise, though, Iverson and the youngling remain very much alone.

  


* * *

  


The youngling keeps breathing, but doesn’t stir until late afternoon. After taking some drink and part of a fish, he nods off again, head pillowed on a pile of seagrass while his body stays close to the water. At least his wounds are healing nicely, Iverson supposes.

It’s another two days before he stays awake for more than a few moments. His soft, gray eyes go wide as Iverson rests a hand on his right shoulder. He swallows thickly and his tawny cheeks pale as Iverson tells him how long it’s been. When Iverson asks for his name, the youngling shrinks away, hunching in on himself and pressing his back against the cave wall.

“I don’t want to hurt you.” Gently squeezing his shoulder, Iverson swears, “I want to help.”

It takes the youngling a moment before he nods. “Shiro—my name, it… It’s Shiro.”

“You’re safe here for as long as you want to be.”

“No one can be safe. Not while the humans—while they’re out and—”

“They aren’t here, Shiro. _We_ are—”

“They’ll come back. They aren’t—they’re not like us, sir—they don’t—”

Clearing his throat, Iverson makes Shiro go silent. He snaps to attention as if he’s been caught stealing someone else’s food.

While the mid-morning sunlight still illuminates things, Iverson gestures toward a recess in the opposite wall. It goes deep enough into the rock that he’s made a decent shelf for his collection, years’ worth of trinkets. Here’s the long-limbed, coral-colored sea-star who Iverson couldn’t revive, desiccated after so many years on display.

There are the gifts that he’s received from the only human who’s not a monster, that adventurer with the ruddy brown skin and long black hair, kept messily tied back from his weathered face. Every time he’s visited throughout the years, he’s brought Iverson these tokens: a chain necklace with a spiral-shaped pendant; a large silver spoon; a slightly tarnished thing that he’d called a _tea-kettle_ ; empty glass bottles with different black-and-white pictures on their wrappings; a bag of coins from all over the humans’ world; little painted figurines shaped like a dolphin, a nautilus, a tortoise, and an octopus; and, most recently, a ring of gold kept on a black cord.

At the center of the display sit Iverson’s trophies: glimmering medallions ripped from jackets, broken pieces of harpoon-wood and the weapons’ glittering pointy ends, and the bones from a trigger-finger that Iverson snapped clean off its hand.

“The beast who lost that? Came after a beluga mer and her new calf. So, I made sure that he could never hunt our kind again.” Resting his palm between Shiro’s shoulder-blades, Iverson tells him, “Stick with me, and I won’t let any human hurt you.”

Shiro shudders as he draws in a deep breath. Without a word, he nods. He slinks back to his resting spot and puts his head down as though merely staying alive has become too heavy a burden.

He doesn’t speak again all day. He makes no attempts at singing. Although he doesn’t sleep, Shiro doesn’t truly seem to stay awake, and he hardly moves at all. When Iverson brings him dinner—three fish, each decently sized, already dead so he won’t need to struggle with them too much—Shiro thanks him. But he eats more slowly than he has before. He puts in the effort to keep going when Iverson watches him, but this, in turn, makes Shiro look as though he might be sick.

At nightfall, when Iverson heads to the open water, Shiro stays behind. Something doesn’t feel right about it. Something about leaving him makes Iverson’s heart thrash guiltily inside his chest, like the cool air around him disapproves of what he’s doing. Like the intangible spirit of the world wants Iverson to know that letting Shiro stay by himself could end in disaster.

Some of the songs he belts claw their way out of him, bursting into the water and careening headlong into the waves, too eager to be sung. Others, he needs to force, and they try their best to fight him on that. Every single note comes out in either brutal yawps or tense, tight keens. Lonely, desperate, fraught with so many emotions that racket around Iverson’s heart. So many feelings that must be sung because no words can encompass them. A song of worry, dread, and longing.

Iverson doesn’t know how long he spends singing. Fortunately, when he slinks back to the grotto, he finds Shiro sleeping, exactly where he left him.

  


* * *

  


Several days after Iverson first brought him home, out of nowhere, Shiro whispers, “You still haven’t said when you want me to leave?”

Iverson furrows his brow. He swallows the bite of fish he snatched up for lunch. “I wasn’t planning on it.”

This makes Shiro tilt his head and slouch. “But this is _your_ home? I’m not even—not that I don’t appreciate being allowed to stay, sir? Because I _do_ appreciate it? But I’m not family to you, or one of your own kind, and I haven’t done anything to earn—not even singing, I—”

“You really want to help out around here? Wait until you’re fully healed.”

Shiro’s cheeks flush pink and he bows his head. Pursing his lips, he glances down at the patch of kelp and algae covering the place where he once had his right arm.

“Shiro, you’ve been hurt—and _badly_. I don’t expect you to do anything but get well.” Iverson nudges his tail-fluke at Shiro’s—bats against him underneath the water—but gets no response. Rolling his good eye, Iverson adds, “Anyway, you won’t want to move. I’ve put out songs. You’ll be able to add your own, soon. When your pod comes for you, don’t you _want_ to be found?”

“They _can’t_.” Tears well up in Shiro’s eyes and he softly bites at his own lip. “There’s no one who can come for me. The humans, they took everyone… My mother… Father… Mother’s father… My father’s sister and her beloved… My brother…” He gulps, hands trembling around the fish that he’s barely eaten from and looking like they might drop it. “No pod… No family… I’m all that’s left of us.”

Snarling, Iverson tears his next bite off the fish. A thin bone pokes his tongue and the inside of his cheek. It makes a _clack!_ sound when he spits it against the wall, and Shiro’s eyes widen as Iverson curls their tails together.

He stares straight at Shiro to promise him, “I’m with you now, son. And you’re with me.”

Shiro frowns, brow crinkling up as he shakes his head. “Sir…?”

Iverson tightens his tail around Shiro’s. Their flukes scrape against each other, then flutter and send ripples coursing through the water. Perhaps Shiro relaxes—or perhaps he simply doesn’t want to argue—but he nods as though he understands what Iverson intends to say.

Shiro’s putting effort into this placating façade. He even allows his lips to curl up into a small, nearly hopeful smile. Still, he’d do a better job convincing Iverson if he didn’t keep glancing at the grotto’s entrance. Or maybe if he didn’t look like his injuries are the only reason he hasn’t tried to escape.

To fend off the doubt lingering in the youngling’s mind, Iverson bumps their tails together once again.

He tells Shiro, “You’ve got no one. I’ve got no one. Now, I won’t make you stick around, if you really want to go.” Huffing softly, Iverson quirks his shoulders. “But I won’t cast you out, either. If you stay, son? Then at least we’ll have each other.”

When Iverson gives the youngling a smile, hope glimmers in Shiro’s eyes.

When he heads into the open water later, for the first time in too long, Iverson’s heart lets him sing a song of joy.

**Author's Note:**

> This story is part of the [LLF Comment Project](https://longlivefeedback.tumblr.com/llfcommentproject), which was created to improve communication between readers and authors. This author invites and appreciates feedback, including:
> 
>   * Short comments
>   * Long comments
>   * Questions
>   * Personal reactions/interpretations
>   * “<3” as extra kudos
>   * Reader-reader interaction
>   * Comments made with the [LLF Comment Builder](https://longlivefeedback.tumblr.com/post/170952243543/now-presenting-the-llf-comment-builder-beta).
> 

> 
> The author reads and appreciates all comments, and gets back to all of them eventually, but may be slow to reply due to trying to rein in the ADHD/anxiety cocktail.
> 
> If, for any reason, you don’t want to receive a reply, just put, “whisper” near the start of your comment, and I’ll appreciate it without replying.
> 
> * * *
> 
> As ever, I’m also on Tumblr ( **[amorremanet](http://amorremanet.tumblr.com/)** , though not quite as often anymore), Pillowfort ( **[amorremanet](https://www.pillowfort.io/amorremanet)** ), Dreamwidth ( **[amor_remanet](http://amor-remanet.dreamwidth.org/)** ), Twitter ( **[amorremanet](https://twitter.com/amorremanet/)** ), and Discord ( **amorremanet#5500** ), and I can usually be summoned with hurt/comfort and/or long-haired Shiro. ♡♡


End file.
